That's an uncommon term, we normally say "traffic shaping". But same difference.

It's a form of Quality of Service, or related to quality of service, where traffic is monitoring and available performance for different types of traffic is adjusted to make some protocols or tasks perform better than others. For example, with traffic shaping you can make teleconferencing, phone calls, and posting on MangoLassi get the best performance, while streaming Netflix and IHeartRadio get the slow lane.

Unlike traditional QoS, it's about "encouraging" patterns rather than enforcing. With normal QoS, phone traffic might get priority, period. But with shaping, it gets more "weight" in the algorithm, but doesn't get a guarantee of always going first.